Genre: Writing

Maggie Messitt is a narrative and immersion journalist, author, and educator who has spent twenty years reporting from inside underserved communities in southern Africa, Appalachia, and the American Midwest. Her work focuses on complex issues through the lens of everyday life, with deep investment in rural regions and questions of justice and equity.

She is the author of Newspaper (Bloomsbury/The Atlantic, 2024), a book-length segmented essay and comparative press history of the United States and South Africa, and The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa (University of Iowa Press, 2015), a work of narrative and immersion journalism long-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Her essays and reportage have appeared in or been broadcast by the BBC, LA Review of Books, Mother Jones, NPR, PBS, the Poetry Foundation, River Teeth, and World Literature Today, among others. She is at work on a third book, a hybrid of memoir and investigation tracing a deeply personal missing persons case.

A dual citizen of the United States and South Africa, Messitt lived and worked in the Lowveld for nearly a decade, where she was editor and publisher of an award-winning community newspaper and founding executive director of a nonprofit media organization that trained women journalists in the former Apartheid-era homelands of Lebowa and Gazankulu. With her team, she also published a literary and arts magazine featuring work by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zakes Mda, Greg Marinovich, and Mikhael Subotzky, later exhibited at Colophon: an International Magazine Symposium in Luxembourg and the We Love Magazine Library in Japan.

Messitt later served as founding National Director of Report for America, growing the program from three reporters in Appalachia to more than 225 across all fifty states and earning recognition from Harvard's NiemanLab as one of "the biggest brains and bank accounts in the fight for local journalism."

Messitt has taught creative writing and journalism for more than fifteen years and edited the work of writers ranging from students to Pulitzer and Orange Prize winners. She has taught in MFA programs, inside minimum/medium security prisons, and at writing festivals and conferences, including Kenyon Review Workshops, Lighthouse Writers, and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She is the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice in Journalism and Director of the News Lab at Penn State University.